Nursing home hearing: 'We are in crisis'

October 20, 2009

Social workers, residents and advocates filled a hearing room today to demand that Illinois stop using nursing homes to house younger adults with mental illness, including felons who police say assaulted, raped and even killed elderly and disabled housemates.

At the four-hour public hearing in Chicago, members of Gov. Pat Quinn's Nursing Home Safety Task Force listened and voiced outrage about the violence in Illinois facilities.

"We have a situation that is not acceptable to us," said task force chairman Michael Gelder, Quinn's senior health policy adviser. He described the hearing as "a call for action."

He and other panel members heard a cascade of criticism and questions about the state's decades-long pattern of channeling younger, mentally ill felons into facilities that house geriatric and disabled residents.

"A nursing home is not the place to test the rehabilitation of violent offenders. It is not the place to see if the fox can live peacefully in the henhouse," said Jamie Jimenez, an advocate with the Community Counseling Centers of Chicago.

"We are in crisis now," said Phyllis Mitzen, co-director of the Center for Long-Term Care Reform. "We find ourselves ... with a need to change the entire long-term care system."

The task force was formed in response to a Tribune investigation, called "Compromised Care," that found government, law enforcement and the nursing home industry have failed to manage the younger residents who shuttle into the facilities from jail cells, shelters and psychiatric wards.

Mark Heyrman, a board member of Mental Health America of Illinois, was among those who said the mixing also is a disservice to psychiatric patients, who often receive substandard treatment in nursing homes and could be more cheaply and effectively housed in community mental health centers and assisted living arrangements.

"Our long-term plan has to be to stop institutionalizing people in nursing homes who are only there because of a mental illness," Heyrman said.

Illinois nursing homes currently house about 15,000 people whose primary diagnosis is a mental illness. The state has launched two pilot programs aimed at moving hundreds of mentally ill people out of nursing homes, but that is "a relatively small demonstration, relative to the need," said Anthony Zipple of Thresholds mental health centers.